The Shadow of the Sun.(Review)

Ryszard Kapuscinski The Shadow of the Sun. Alfred A. Knopf, 325 pages, $25

Joseph Conrad believed that Catholic, Western-oriented Poland was historically destined to be a mediator between the civilization of Europe and the barbaric hordes of Asiatic Russia. In a similar fashion, the Polish-born Ryszard Kapuscinski is ideally suited to mediate between the First World of the West and the Third World countries of Africa. Free from colonial guilt and contrition, he told his African friends: "You were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For one hundred and thirty years [1772-1918] we were the colony of three foreign powers. White ones, too."

Like a hunter pursuing a wounded animal, he has followed the trail of blood through Africa. Frequently risking death, he's attacked by giant roaches; is threatened by a cobra that can't be crushed by a huge, sharp canister; suffers tuberculosis and cerebral malaria; is ambushed in northern Uganda; and nearly perishes of thirst when his truck breaks down in the Mauritanian desert. Like Walt Whitman, he can say: "I am the man, I suffered, I was there."

Kapuscinski explains that "the epoch of the fifties and sixties [was] full of promise and hope." But in the mid-Seventies Africa "entered its two darkest decades. Civil wars, revolts, coups d'etat, massacres, and hunger" ravaged and destroyed the continent. In 1964, on the first of my three trips to Africa during that optimistic decade, Africans were friendly rather than hostile to whites, the colonial infrastructure had not decayed, cities were safe, wildlife was protected. Islam was quiescent rather than fanatical, AIDS didn't exist, corruption and genocide were not yet pandemic. I remember the dry palm leaves flapping in the breeze like buzzards' wings; the soft pumping handshakes; the outsize bottles of Tusker beer; the smell of rotten fruit, burnt oil, pungent sweat, and red earth; the vultures squatting on corrugated iron roofs; the piles of dead dogs on the beach; the Edenic gardens of the English settlers; the eyes of hyenas reflecting the headlights of cars.

Airports were small, officials engaging rather than rapacious, and when catching a plane you could drive right on to the runway and clamber up the metal stairs. Hitchhiking around East Africa, I sometimes waited half an hour for the first car to appear, but I was always picked up and often given hospitality by farmers and soldiers. Undesirable cabinet ministers were occasionally thrown out of airplanes, but political leaders like Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kenyatta were at least more statesmanlike than their monstrous successors: Bokassa, Mobutu, and Amin, who fed his enemies to the crocodiles. For all its faults, British colonialism, by providing medicine, education, administration, transport, and industry did a great deal of good in Africa.

In his previous books Kapuscinski zeroed in on the wars and revolutions in Iran, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, and Angola. Written for Polish newspapers over a period of forty years, this book is more elegiac in tone. A loosely structured collection of dispatches, in neither chronological nor geographical order, it needs a map and a table of contents. In one of the early pieces he describes traditional village life in the Ashanti kingdoms of Ghana as if it were like Edward Hicks's painting The Peaceable Kingdom. He ignores the well-documented practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, and states: "They are closely attached to their extremely rich history, their traditions, beliefs, and laws" But this idealized Africa is soon replaced by a horrific and more realistic vision of "hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees ... rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities."

Writing, as it were, in slippers rather than combat boots, Kapuscinski offers ...